However, this year came with a new brand of tea leaves, brought on by a significant change: whereas past years have seen winners determined by a limited blue-ribbon panel of voters in a given peer group, this year the voting was opened up to all members of said groups, meaning the voting pool increased exponentially. Reporting speculated that this could dramatically alter the winners, skewing toward populist series and diminishing the impact of the episode submissions that were typically considered crucial variables in the blue-ribbon panels’ decisions.

Accordingly, this year’s predictions narrative had more weight than usual, pushing those who were following the story to see each early win as a marker of a given narrative. And it didn’t take long for such a narrative to emerge, even if I joked about it being premature when I called it early on: HBO swept through the broadcast like the behemoth it once was, laying waste to numerous records in the process. Game of Thrones shattered the record for most wins by a series in a single year well before it won for Outstanding Drama Series, and Veep won three awards—including the fourth consecutive win for Julia Louis-Dreyfus and second for Tony Hale—before it emerged to dethrone Modern Family and take HBO’s second-ever win for Outstanding Comedy Series. Combine with Olive Kitteridge’s near-sweep of the Limited Series category—losing only Supporting Actress—and you have the most dominant performance for a single channel or network in recent Emmys history. It’s the first time that a single channel has taken home the TV Movie (Bessie), Limited Series (or Miniseries), Drama, and Comedy awards in the same year since the TV Movie category was added in 1980.

There are a large number of conclusions we could make based on this. We could discuss how the opening up of the voting pool privileged a show like Game of Thrones that has both large viewership and strength in the creative arts categories whose voters were previously unlikely to vote in the program awards. We might ask if the accessibility of HBO programming—both through elaborate screener DVD boxes sent to voters and through the ease of HBO Go/HBO Now—makes it more likely that voters have seen shows on the channel, versus some of the competition. We can ponder how the potential dilution of submitted episodes’ importance to the process privileged past winners and nominees with whom voters were familiar (thus giving Veep an advantage over newcomer Transparent, which won Lead Actor and Directing Emmys for Amazon Studios).

And yet here’s the thing about awards: we’ll never know. Although the social media consensus on my feed seems to be that Game of Thrones would have been more deserving in earlier seasons, or that Transparent was breaking more ground in comedy than Veep’s political satire, there’s every possibility Emmy voters felt Game of Thrones had its strongest year yet and Transparent was a drama masquerading as a comedy and dragged down by Maura’s unlikeable children. It becomes easy to forget in efforts to “solve” the Emmy voting process by turning it into an objective process that it is an inherently subjective one. And while I am an advocate for contextualizing the specific subjectivities that shape each year’s winners lest we accept the prestige they’ve come to represent as an asterisk-free marker of television greatness, this year’s awards reminded me and everyone else who follows the Emmys too closely that there will never be evidence to support any of our conclusions. We will never know exactly why a given series or performer or writer or director won an Emmy award. It is beyond our reach.

And yet lest the above read as an outright rejection of Emmys narratives, this was nonetheless a night that reinforced how the swirling subjectivity of industry awards can transform such that objective consensus emerges. Fitting given the night’s controversial spoiler-laden montage of series finales—which would’ve been harmless with fewer climactic moments chosen in editing—this was a night where two actors had their last chance to win an Emmy for a role that will define their career. And whereas Parks and Recreation’s Amy Poehler had her chance swept away by the HBO tide, Mad Men’s Jon Hamm emerged victorious, winning his first Emmy—and the first acting Emmy for any actor on the AMC series, inconceivably—and earning a standing ovation in the process.

Technically, that win inspires just as many questions. Had the tape system and limited voting pools held an often-reprehensible character back in previous years? Did all those HBO-happy voters feel about The Newsroom the way I felt about The Newsroom? And yet those questions don’t matter as much when the victory feels just, as was also the case when Viola Davis—the clear standout of the uneven How To Get Away With Murder—took to the stage after winning Lead Actress in a Drama Series and spoke eloquently and righteously about the struggle facing actresses of color when you don’t see people like you standing on that stage winning Emmys. It doesn’t matter if this new voting system was responsible for Davis’ win, because it was both a deserving performance—although there’s that subjectivity again—and because it represents a small step toward addressing the Academy’s longstanding struggle with diversity.

You could argue that “it doesn’t matter” describes the whole evening, and not just the various procedures that preceded it: it is very possible to overstate the importance of the Emmy Awards, as HBO publicity will helpfully—if deservedly—demonstrate over the next 24-72 hours. But Davis’ win stands out as an example of an Emmys moment that unquestionably matters, and pushes a deeper consideration into not simply who wins Emmys, but how they win them, and how that remains an area where greater work in diversity and representation can and should be explored by the Television Academy. And perhaps here we can make a distinction, then: it may be impossible to safely predict the Emmys, but it’s very possible to investigate that process with a critical eye, one that hopefully with move beyond procedures to the politics that underlie them in the years that follow.

The lack of crowd response led Harrelson to dub it “too much of an inside joke,” but it was far from the only joke that seemed designed for those who spend their waking hours scouring industry trade press (or, to put a finer point on it, for me). I got the joke, and a good portion of my self-selected Twitter feed got the joke, and I even got the subtextual joke of McConaughey and Harrelson presenting the award many expected they’d be competing for until True Detective switched categories. However, one imagines the presumed mass audience of television viewers tuning into this year’s ceremony had no idea what Harrelson was referring to, just as they were confused by Seth Meyers’ jokes about Orange is the New Black’s category switching, or by Julianna Margulies’ pointed “22 episodes a year” reference in her acceptance speech, or by the words “Tatiana Maslany” in the Billy on the Street pre-taped segment.

The internal politics of the Emmy Awards are a rich discursive space, one that plays out each year in the nominating process, the nominations, and then the broadcast itself. Months of trade publication ad campaigns, Gold Derby Google Hangouts, and talk show appearances all converge in a single evening, and for those who follow that narrative it becomes a game of seeing whose submission tape won over the voters and how a show’s win in one category could signal a win in a different category later in the show. As one of those people, the Emmys broadcast is a dynamic experience, a vessel within which existing television industry narratives—the rise of Netflix, the miniseries/limited series debate, the “dramedy” problem—are highlighted, complicated, and narrativized. Although who wins may not actually “matter,” it is nonetheless part of the process by which the television industry understands itself, and thus a piece in the puzzle of how we understand the television industry.

However, the Emmys rarely present themselves in this way: instead, they are a celebration of television, heralding the greatness of the medium in this golden era. But this year’s ceremony made no effort to narrativize the year in television beyond a brief opening countdown and a Weird Al Yankovic theme song parody medley, even eschewing the typical tributes to each genre as the ceremony moves from section to section. The show’s lack of flow—including the In Memoriam beginning with no introduction—left no room for any attempt to make it all mean something more than a collection of subjective evaluations of television quality mixed in with jokes for people who read Deadline, a choice that made the awards feel remarkably niche despite the fact that broadcast series performed surprisingly well, in opposition to Meyers’ monologue joke about cable and Netflix’s dominance.

The lack of an effort to hail a more mainstream audience was particularly confusing when Television Academy president Bruce Rosenblum emerged for his speech about the state of the medium of television, the one moment in the show dedicated to the kind of self-narrativizing we’re used to seeing in other elements of the broadcast. However, Rosenblum delivered his speech as Sofia Vergara stood on a rotating platform as eye candy to distract us from this typical, “boring” award show ritual. The objectification of the bit was concerning, particularly given Rosenblum’s specific comments regarding the increased diversity of the Academy mashed up with Vergara’s “This is what it’s like in America” banter, but it was also puzzling given that the rest of the broadcast seemed designed for an audience tuned into the industrial logics surrounding multi-platform viewing.

The narrative of any given award show has always been discursive, determined by the winners and how those winners are spun by the press: you could sense the headlines changing as the night went on, with Modern Family and Breaking Bad’s continued success drowning out the possible “Rise of Netflix” or “Movie Stars on TV” narratives that were carried into the ceremony. The latter offered the broadcast’s most concentrated reference point, although one that was more reinforced by Jimmy Kimmel’s brief hosting takeover, Comedy Directing winner Gail Mancuso’s eye contact with McConaughey during her acceptance speech, and Julia Roberts’ inflection during her presenting gig than by any element of the production itself. In the absence of a production-sponsored narrative, narratives sprung from other elements of the evening, diving further into inside baseball territory as the night wore on.

It also, at least in my experience, amplified the role of social media in shaping these narratives. As following award shows on Twitter becomes a more accepted—if not necessarily mainstream—practice, it becomes a subsequent space through which award show broadcasts are translated. What would have historically been post-show overviews by trade press or major newspapers becomes color commentary and factual details that work in real time to transform the chaos of subjectivity into disappointment, excitement, surprise, or any other narrative imaginable. And when the broadcast itself is making minimal effort to contribute to that narrative itself or pull it away from the specifics of winners and losers, social media emerges to fill the gap for those choosing to view the show in a connected setting.

There is an argument to be made for an understated Emmys broadcast, especially given it came in at exactly three hours, but it creates a vacuum of meaning that needs to be explored further. While this results in some broad pro/con narratives in the context of the popular press, it also reminds us of the Academy’s disinterest in highlighting issues of race or gender in the context of their broadcast, and pushes us to continue exploring the identity politics—or lack thereof—of award shows that in their absence of narrative invites us to construct our own based on their disparate component parts and the filters through which we engage with them.

Almost Human [Premiered 11/17/2013]

Karl Urban stars as John Kennex, a no-nonsense cop in a future where every cop is paired with an android partner. Re-entering the force after a personal tragedy, he’s paired with Dorian (Michael Ealy), a rejected android model whose emotional capacities are heightened. They form an uneasy partnership to confront a corrupt world, one case at a time.

Kit Hughes [University of Wisconsin-Madison]

This is a show that wants its viewers to ask, “ah, but which one of them is ‘almost human’?”

I have other questions.

1. Why should we care about anything in this future, which seems to be populated only by abusive cops, robots with weird cheekbones, and crime/“the syndicate”?
   1. Is it because there are allegedly some good noodles places and that one pale, creepy science guy who’s in every procedural (you know, to shore up the masculinity of the protagonist) still listens to Depeche Mode?
   2. How do we distinguish allusion from cliché writing?
      1. Fake epithets (“synthetics”) and underground medicine (“Recollectionists”); seriously?
      2. Is AH’s characterization of its villains lazier for ripping off the masks in V for Vendetta or for simply calling them “the syndicate”?
      3. Why can’t people leave Blade Runner alone?
      4. Could this show actually have something interesting to say about the monstrosity of bureaucratic records-keeping systems, data collection, and the politics of access?
         1. Could it move past its gleeful focus on surveillance?
         2. Why was their evidence locker so bright? Doesn’t the future care about preservation storage conditions?
         3. Will any show ever recapture the delightful chemistry of Perfect Strangers?

Jenna Stoeber [University of Wisconsin-Madison]

A set up so classic it seems like something from a satire; technology/crime/drugs are out of control. John (Karl Urban), a renegade human police officer with a mysteriously disappeared ex-girlfriend, memory problems, a pill addiction, and a synthetic leg, loses his partner in a tragic-heroic accident. The majority of the episode takes place post-recovery, when he is partnered up with Dorian (Michael Ealy), an emotional, buggy android. The set-up is a classic buddy-cop odd-couple formula.

Like much cyberpunk media, it features a vaguely pan-Asian design-skin that looks like it was ripped from Blade Runner. The morality and characters are pure I, Robot, and there’s even a dash of the Saw franchise mixed in for flavor; The whole episode has a cinematic feel to it, perhaps due to the high production value and well executed design. And yet, there’s something distinctly uncomfortable with watching Urban rampage through the episode, alternatively harassing and assaulting people, and being generally unbearably unpleasant. I suppose his aggressive interactions with Ealy are meant to be read as social commentary, but lack the follow through to be anything other than bizarrely offensive. Luckily, after roughly 20 minutes of being partners, they bond over synthetic body parts, and, gee, discrimination is solved!

Brooklyn Nine-Nine [Premiere 09/17/2013]

A workplace comedy that happens to be set at a police station, Andy Samberg stars as a typically immature—for Samberg—detective, Jake Peralta, whose ecosystem is threatened by the presence of new chief Ray Holt, played by Andre Braugher. Surrounded by supporting players not dissimilar to those found on co-creator Mike Schur’s Parks and Recreation, including Melissa Fumero’s eager detective who looks to Holt as a mentor figure, the two cops must balance their respective career goals with the new comic situation in front of them.

Alyx Vesey [University of Wisconsin-Madison]

Brooklyn Nine-Nine brings law enforcement back to the workplace sitcom. But it’s also a comment on the buddy cop genre. Molly Eichel signposted the Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage” video. I’d add The Heat, which referenced Lethal Weapon to foreground women’s professional friendships. This parallels Andy Samberg’s roast of James Franco, which mocked the “tradition” of capitulating to racist, sexist, and homophobic insult humor. Jake Peralta riffs on an archetype, trading Martin Riggs’ self-destruction for arrested development.

What is most promising about the pilot’s commentary on heteromasculinity is its pervasiveness. Take Andre Braugher’s authoritative performance as Ray Holt, precinct 99’s new no-nonsense commanding officer. Toward the end of the pilot, Holt reveals that it took so long to become captain because the NYPD was uncomfortable with his homosexuality. I like Melissa Fumero as Detective Amy Santiago, a focused, unsentimental woman who won’t back down from a challenge, even if she’s dousing sandwiches in hot sauce. I appreciated the wink to Cagney and Lacey, after whom Sergeant Terry Jeffords (Terry Crews) named his daughters. I’m also intrigued by the tentative connection between detective Rose Diaz (Stephanie Beatriz), detective Charles Boyle (Joe Lo Truglio) and administrator Gina Linetti (Chelsea Peretti), as I’d like to see gifted physical comedian Lo Truglio (the muffin scene!) play romance.

Some jokes rubbed me the wrong way. Peralta and Santiago compete to see who can arrest more people because filtering citizens through the prison industrial complex is hilarious? The Disco Strangler brandished a yo-yo, ha? But the runner of older women going about their day while the team nabs criminals tickled me. I’ll take another coffee break with this crew.

Evan Elkins [University of Wisconsin-Madison]

Newsradio remains the gold standard against which I judge all ensemble television comedies. This is patently unfair, but it’s how my brain works. To my mind, the flawless cast (yes, even Joe Rogan. But seriously, take another look at that Newsradio cast) and ingenious, multi-cam-meets-Jacques-Tati staging still haven’t been matched. There are other contenders, some of which can be traced back through the lineage of Brooklyn Nine-Nine co-creator Michael Schur, but it’s Newsradio that, above all others, shows me the heights that the ensemble comedy genre can reach.

One episode in, Brooklyn Nine-Nine doesn’t wither under my harsh, Newsradio-comparing gaze as much as most programs do. In fact, it might be the funniest cop-comedy pilot since Poochinski. While it’s nothing special formally—it sticks to a now-familiar, unremarkable single-cam format, in part to half-heartedly invoke the look of a cop drama when it needs to—the cast is pretty terrific. In particular, I’m always happy to encounter Jo Lo Truglio, who can play a middle-aged sad sack better than anyone at this point (though I imagine his character’s quirks will be significantly less weird than they wound up being in the second season of Burning Love.)

Anyway, once it finds its footing—and it’s already quite a bit further along than most comedy pilots—it could contribute to a pretty solid Fox Tuesday night lineup. Just pretend Dads doesn’t exist.

Jennifer Smith [Independent Scholar]

“The only puzzle he hasn’t solved is how to grow up.” This description of protagonist Jake Peralta (at the conclusion of an awkwardly expository list of character summaries delivered by the squad’s captain early in the pilot) perfectly summarizes the central problem with Brooklyn Nine-Nine: Andy Samberg’s man-child persona. In a cast as diverse as this one, the central focus on one of the only straight white men – and a petulant, obnoxious one at that – is disappointing, if sadly unsurprising.

Creator Michael Schur’s Parks and Recreation works so well because Leslie Knope, overwhelming as she may sometimes be, is both inherently likable and unique in the current television landscape. But here, in a world (a police precinct) where the stakes are high and the supporting cast is full of complex, interesting individuals, the focus rests on the same irritating, immature, sexually-harassing schlub found at the center of any Chuck Lorre sitcom.

I’d love to keep watching for the sake of the other characters, especially the brilliant Andre Braugher’s older, gay, black police captain (the polar opposite of a stock character). But unless Peralta quickly solves the aforementioned puzzle, I’m not sure how long I can stick around.

Anne Gilbert [Rutgers University]

Brooklyn Nine-Nine has a lot going for it from the start – the writers crib effectively from police procedurals to shorthand all the crime solving, the cast has an easy sense of camaraderie, and Andre Braugher’s knowing, poker-faced delivery is comedy gold. But before I can get on board, the show needs to get to know its tone; the pilot is balancing in a no man’s land between “quirky” and “downright absurd.”

There will be inevitable comparisons to Scrubs, which juggled a similar serious content/wacky delivery approach, but Brooklyn Nine-Nine hasn’t yet made the commitment to a similar level of weird. Instead, it has a pervasive wry and offbeat tone that genuinely works, but gets thrown off-kilter with, for instance, the flashback of the Disco Strangler going after a victim with a blinking yo-yo, or Samberg’s Detective Peralta sporting a garish Speedo swimsuit in an attempt to prove a point – or, honestly, every attempt to tell me, again and again, that Peralta is actually meant to be a good detective.

As of now, it’s a fun show that, if it is able to find its feet and develop its characters, could eventually be really funny.

~ ~ ~

Sleepy Hollow [Premiered 09/16/2013]

A time-traveling Ichabod Crane (Tom Mison) wakes up in modern day Sleepy Hollow to discover his nemesis the Headless Horseman is still wreaking havoc; he also informs the Sheriff’s deputy who discovers him (Nicole Beharie) that the Headless Horseman is actually one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Death. Death also has a machine gun. And he wants his head back. Thus begins a journey into a mythology rife with presidential bibles, witches, and fated connections between an odd-couple male/female pairing from the minds of Phillip Iscove and producers Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orci, and director Len Wiseman.

William Proctor [University of Sunderland]

The synopsis of Sleepy Hollow sounds deliciously absurd: take the principle character of the Washington Irving novel, Ichabod Crane, and his nemesis, the Headless Horseman, throw in a dose of temporal mayhem and, like other contemporary myth translations, bring it kicking and screaming – and slicing – into the 21^st century. The pilot episode begins to develop the show’s mythos and world-building with economy and panache. There is plenty of potential here and, despite the derivative nature of the narrative – it could be a season-long arc of Supernatural, for instance – the chemistry between protagonists Ichabod and his cop side-kick is satisfying enough to warrant interest. One gets the feeling that the writers have their tongue firmly rooted in their cheek and set out to have fun. Clancy Brown, who played the Kurgan in 1980s cult classic Highlander with demonic delight, provides a cameo and is summarily decapitated early in the episode – the irony of which will not be lost on avid connoisseurs of pop culture and fans of Highlander (remember the tag-line and accompanying Queen song? ‘Don’t lose your head’). Some of the humour is in bad taste (asking a black police officer if she is ‘emancipated from slavery’ misses the mark somewhat), but the overall tone of the show is breezy and full of joie de vivre, a palliative to the sombre atmosphere of this post-Dark Knight world.

Taylor Cole Miller [University of Wisconsin-Madison]

Last week before class, I showed my students some trailers for fall premieres, among them FOX’s Sleepy Hollow. While I introduced the title, a few scooted up in their seats, excitedly anticipating what might’ve been Downton Abbey meets American Horror Story–a period scare-piece to relish in the ever-earlier, ever-colder Wisconsin darkness. After a few scenes, though, most lost interest, preferring instead to relish their last few minutes of cellular freedom. If a 1790s Sleepy Hollow was too boring for Hollywood, a 2013 “modern-day retelling” with guns was too boring for them–and for me, too.

I hesitate to be so cynical, especially because Sleepy Hollow is really more like the homely lovechild of two very capable parents: The X Files and Hocus Pocus. Perhaps I’d be quick to forgive, then, because I really want to love it. But the pilot is burdened by the weight of a new mythology that it data-dumps on us while confronting its ancient protagonist with his “enlightened” racism (“Nay, I do not support slavery!”), baffling technology, a gun-wielding redcoat, and a George-Washington Jesus.

But ultimately, I AM pessimistic. The pilot isn’t even fully invested in itself–the humor is as tentative as the horror. I’ll be unlikely to follow Sleepy Hollow as it stomps around searching for purpose–sometimes for humor, sometimes for pity–not all together unlike its infamous headless horseman himself.

C. Lee Harrington [Miami University]

Me likey! With “Sympathy for the Devil” and two beheadings in the first ten minutes, count me in. I don’t remember enough about the original story to be bothered by inconsistencies so this was pure fun: respectable acting, nice atmospheric touches, acceptable evocation of the supernatural (excepting the horse’s eyes, whaaat?), packed full of backstory, a bit of humor, and pretty much what a premiere should be.

I didn’t much go for the romantic subtext between Abby and Ichabod given everything the characters had gone through but I understand the point from a production perspective. And I didn’t much go for Ichabod’s ease with finding himself in the 21^st century: he never asks what year it is, is more bemused over a car’s power windows than freaked out that something like cars even exist, and finds the trappings of mass commercial culture only mildly interesting.

The premiere sets up interesting questions for the series as a whole: What does Andy know and how does he know it? For that matter, what did George Washington know and how did he know it? Who all is part of the coven? What’s with that bird?  I’ll definitely watch next week.

Jenna Stoeber (University of Wisconsin – Madison)

The series premiere of Sleepy Hollow starts out with a rough recounting of Washington Irving’s famous story; it has to start this way, otherwise the audience would spend the rest of the episode struggling to connect the premise of the show with the legend. The plot seems to be taking a something-for-everyone approach, offering up magic, historical fantasy, biblical prophecy, hints of an Illuminati conspiracy theory, and a guest appearance by George Washington. However, this is a minor complaint. Aside from the scattershot of plot threads and the heaps of exposition, very little about the episode feels like a premiere – in a good way. The story doesn’t dwell on the mundane aspects of the urban fantasy genre, namely the laborious magic-is-real coping that often drags down such shows. The writing is clever and entertaining, and the plot moves along at a brisk pace. Nicole Beharie, playing lieutenant Abbie Mills, performs her role like she’s been doing it for years, and the interactions between her and Tom Mison, playing Ichabod Crane, are captivating. The episode wasn’t without cheesiness – the image of the headless horseman with a bandolier and a shotgun is certainly a wake-up call – but the absurdity is grounded in Beharie’s exceptional performance. I look forward to seeing which plot threads they pick up in next week’s episode.

MasterChef Junior [Premiered 09/27/2013]

In this spinoff, Chef Gordon Ramsay invites us to remember American Juniors with a pint-size take on his successful MasterChef series, toning down the vindictive to walk talented young chefs through the competition.

R. Colin Tait [Texas Christian University]

With Friday’s release of his sixth show for the FOX network, super-chef Gordon Ramsay scores a homerun with the junior version of MasterChef. By tweaking the formula so that restaurateur Joe Bastianich and celebrity chef Gordon Eliot can praise, rather than cut down, the contestants, the creative team has created a rarity on TV – a reality show that concentrates on celebrating and supporting its competitors, rather than berating them for their lack of talent. Of course, it helps that these contestants are adorable and precocious children.

By focusing on children rather than adults, the show stacks the equation for audiences too, making it nearly impossible not to root for them, especially when they collapse into tears of joy or sadness, as they often do. These would-be chefs also bring out the soft side in the normally abrasive hosts, who are not only on their best behavior here, but whose personas actually seem charming in comparison to the adult version of the show. This is especially true of Ramsay and co-host Bastianich, whose sunny dispositions are a welcome change.

My only complaint is that these would-be-amateurs seem to come exclusively from society’s upper crust and come complete with refined palettes of the cultural elite. But, otherwise, this show is guaranteed to please parents and their children alike.

Karen Petruska [University of California – Santa Barbara]

The main reasons to watch MasterChef—both the grown-up version and the new tiny human spinoff featuring kids 8-13 years old—are the charming and charismatic chef judges (fathers all), from Gordon Ramsay of Hell’s Kitchen fame, Graham Elliot as the “nice” judge, and my personal favorite culinary crush, Joe Bastianich, know for his steely stare and for smelling food before tasting it. While this version of the program sticks closely to the tested formula established by the adult version, the series nevertheless continues to find success in mining for food-oriented tension. It also features some pretty cute kids who reveal a remarkable level of self-possession and self-confidence.

They prepare dishes from French macaroons to homemade pasta, and the judges agree that every single dish is very good, even though a few kids receive gentle critiques about dry shortcake or overcooked pasta. Ramsay is best known for his cursing, but what he really does well (especially on Hell’s Kitchen) is teach. So far it seems we won’t get contestant cattiness, always an element of the adult version, but I will be interested to see if the kids form friendships and if the program lets us see them suffer inevitable disappointment (their parents, off on the sidelines, never speak but are there to offer a hug for those who do not advance). If the program maintains its current tone of constant, consistent inspiration for the love of food, it is something I’d encourage my own nieces to watch. Maybe they’ll be inspired, too.